The Expelled by Mois Benarroch Read Free Book Online

you have anything to eat?”
    Then I saw a cow's head dropping a few inches from where I was, and another followed, and the third almost dropped on my head but I moved to the side and hit myself against a tree. They were all olive trees. And some of them were split in two because of the wall, trees in two worlds. I thought.
    “Don’t you have anything other than heads?”
    Then, it started raining cow tails.
    “Alright, enough, enough, we got it.”
    Then they brought out a grill and with olive tree branches we prepared beef cheeks and brains. The food wasn't so bad. Without anyone saying anything and without asking for permission, the back people came and ate with us. After eating, they left and sat in their place. They didn't think they could take part in the decision-making process. One of them gave me a notebook and asked me to keep it. I have it here. And I'll read it all to you, if you don't tell me who you are, I can tell you it's not very peachy, there are no flying cows or elephant heads in here, so let's start.
    ––––––––
    2 .
    The Expelled
    Maybe everything ended the day I was born. On that one October day. But now I see it all differently, I see my innocence as someone who sees a train that doesn't know how to stop at a station. I remember, I reminisce on those flashes from my twenties in the literary group Marot in Jerusalem when I saw myself as a Jean Cocteau but the world had already decided I would be a Baudelaire, a poet cursed by his people and his innocence, cursed by his ignorance. I say it now that I'm on the threshold of the success that I've always longed for, and a few months away from publishing my first novel at the publishing house Destino. Destiny, destiny has arrived even in the form of the publisher's name, it was all about destiny. The days and hours and backaches from typing so much and trying so much, to find those liberating words.
    Maybe it all started the day I was born, for having been born in a country that had disappeared from the map of my people, the Jewish people. Without realizing, the people and its conscience had wandered off to Warsaw and Berlin, leaving Africa off the map. So when I was twelve years old, I came to Israel, what I call the immigration that ended it all. Since then they ask me if I'm really from Morocco, and sometimes they don't believe me when I say yes and they argue with me, and not even my ID card convinces them. I don't care anymore. Or yes, yes it matters to me but my expulsion from the Jewish town has become part of me. That day in 1972, that morning of unprecedented dawn, that morning I became a black man, a colonized person, although I still had blue-green eyes and white skin, those blue eyes that my daughter wanted for her. Why didn't you give me the color of your eyes? The color of the eyes change sweetheart, yes they do.
    Without realizing I had become a completely different person, and each look that defined me, without my knowing, made me more and more a foreigner and someone else. But I didn't know that and thus, what I tried to do was to stop being different. In order to stop being different, I had to stop being born in Morocco, something that no one knows how to do yet. Or if someone knows and has done it, he hasn't told us how.
    That's why now I remember my twenties, the eighties of the twentieth century in the group of poets and artists, the fights, the discussions, the madness, the women, the men and my innocence. My sweet innocence. We met every Friday at Binyanei Hauma, the poet B-S was on guard duty there on weekends. His shift began Friday at two p.m. and ended on Sunday at seven a.m. That's how he spent all his weekends and how he earned a living. We, the poets, started arriving at the huge empty building, with rooms and stairs, around five, and at ten p.m. we were four or twenty, or sometimes more. It's in these settings that we had the idea of publishing a magazine and it's also there that Roni says I tried to rape her on